In our experience, we’ve learned that what seems like common sense is rarely common practice.
The distinguishing factor or point of difference in optimizing performance is to lean how to turn common sense into common practice – consistently so.
As simple as it sounds, this is one of the most important elements of any successful transformation – including differential real estate developments. The goal is to effect a change of mindset and behavior.
A look into behavioral science shows 3 key elements that are necessary for an effective capability building in real eatate:
Leadership Role Modeling
Employee Engagement
Virtual Delivery
Role Modeling
One of the best ways to drive the adoption of new mindset and behaviors is by leadership role modeling – that is to ensure that the leaders model or mirror the desired change. When people see highly visible colleagues behaving differently, it reinforces the new way of working and signals a commitment to the desired change. Transformation.
Research shows that people naturally mimic both consciously and unconsciously the actions of the individuals or groups around them.
When leaders change their own behaviors, they indicate to everyone else that this change is real, this singular action more than anything else builds trust, without trust no change can take place.
Management must actually do things that are different. Show some evidence of change, take some risk, responsibility, and be held accountable. When employees sense the commitment of management to transformation, see how important the change or proposition is to their boss, they always respond in kind. This birth a healthy movement of encouragement and recognition.
Top leadership must acknowledge and respond kindly when an employee demonstrates the behaviors that the program is trying to establish. However simple or basic that capabilities may sometimes appear, the reward of its effectiveness is in consistence of application – i.e. to consistently apply the skills effectively. Drastically, this always increases productivity.
Employee – scale Engagement
For capability building to happen, wide spread participation in transformation program must sufficiently happen alongside. It must be scaled well beyond isolated events with a chosen few, because people who aren’t included in a transformation move feel disconnected, disengaged or left behind.
Anything less than employee-scale engagement defeats the purpose. At least 25% workforce direct engagement to create a new cultural shift.
To inspire behavioral change at all levels of organization, a capability building program should target the organization’s top influencers. These influencers ought to serve as the champions of the new way of working. They can achieve this through use of personal narratives and compelling arguments.
Virtual Delivery
An environment for sustained capability learning. In person learnings or workshops may prove to have constrains sometimes, could be logistics constrain or budget limitations of having everyone gather at the same space and time.
Virtual capability building is a good way to solve this, and makes room for extended or sustained learning – even for global reach. A digital program could be made available for wider participation.
Virtual formats also allow for configuration and tailoring, deeper levels of feedbacks. Chat functions in videoconferencing enables ease of conversations and questions in real-time, which would ordinarily be disruptive in a physical setting.
Capabilities and Transformation
4 progressive capability building steps for a successful (real estate) transformation:
1 Individual employee learn new capabilities.
2 Teams apply learning, capabilities and new behaviors is established.
3 Organization begins to see incremental improvements in effectiveness.
4 Company achieves its performance, financial goals and other aims.
Effective capability building would help real estate players to develop the mindsets, behaviors, and skills needed to power industry transformation and reach their full potentials.
By: Nonso Okwaraji
Learning credit: McKinsey & Company